What do You think about The Room (2001)?
The Room is the opposite of Last Exit to Brooklyn and there is a sad explanation for this. Last Exit was his first and The Room was his second. Between the two lay seven years of junk. He spent all the dough from Last Exit, which was considerable, on being a junkie in Los Angeles, where he had fled to get away from the junkies in New York. The Room is a book written by heroin.Last Exit gives you a tour of hell, a panorama of suffering, drag queens, hoods, lathe operators, union bosses, working class wives, old people, bartenders. The Room gives you one man's mind. You're in it and you never get out of it for the whole novel. The guy is sick, the guy is insane. 288 pages of an insane guy muttering revenge fantasies about the police and about women. It's a cul-de-sac, it's a massive artistic mistake, it's a terminal book ending in the reader's death by asphyxiation due to lack of any oxygen, no windows, no perspective, no air, you die.Who else followed a five star novel with a one star novel? Selby was unique.
—Paul Bryant
Selby’s second novel is his attempt at a knockabout comedy—drunk vicars chatting up girls on the village green, various cream-heavy pastries being lobbed into the faces of pompous landowners, amusing misunderstandings between bachelors and the parents of honourable virgins. The Room’s republication as a Penguin Classic will kick-start that much-needed Benny Hill revival the world has been begging for. On second thoughts, I might have the wrong book. This one explores the tormented psyche of an unnamed convict as he seethes in his cell, planning his revenge against his arresting officers in elaborate civic action and courtroom scenes, and indulging in horrible canine torture sequences in bile-stirring graphic detail, in case anyone might mistake this man as the victim of a brutalizing regime of injustice. Selby’s most inventive book structurally and typographically, and a contender for his most shocking and hopeless (tough competition), The Room is a pitiful howl from a personal abyss (Selby’s?) most people won’t care to hear. More scattershot than the word-perfect masterpiece Last Exit to Brooklyn (Selby was writing without Sorrentino’s editorial guidance at this point), this is still a wrenching and necessary novel from an unflinching visceral realist—long before Bolaño made that sound sexy.
—MJ Nicholls
The most disturbing novel I've ever read. Al conocer el autor de este libro, Hubert Selby Jr., escritor de Réquiem por un sueño, esperaba algo de crudeza, pero no a estas proporciones. ''La habitación'' nos guía por la tortuosa mente de un prisionero en proceso de juicio confinado a aislamiento; mente repleta de fantasías sádicas de lo más gráficas que involucran a las personas que él considera culpables de su actual situación, los agentes policiales... Todo ello combinado con pensamientos en retrospectiva de diversos sucesos de índole sexual, así como encontronazos con la Ley. Esta no es la típica historia de reo-sádico-quiere-venganza, sino que va mucho más allá, explorando la mezcolanza de emociones de un hombre que se debate entre la realidad y la ficción, la impotencia, la soledad y la culpa... Sentimientos que no necesariamente acarrean fantasías de las cuales vanagloriarse, pero de lo más humanos. Y en última instancia la única vía de escape para un hombre cuya causa considera justa.Recomiendo este libro {para quien esté de humor xD).
—Sthephan Marte
